Let's speculate on these guys motives

Politicians never fed a hungry child, but they want to cash in on the work of those who do (as Ronald Reagan used to joke, 'Politics is the world's second oldest profession...and it has a lot in common with the oldest.');

Food has increasingly become a target for opportunist investors looking for easy profit, hurting the world's poor and fuelling instability, a senior U.N. agricultural official said on Monday.

From his air conditioned office in Rome.

Speculation by financial institutions on food futures has contributed to food price volatility, experts say, causing price bubbles and dips that have hit the world's poorest the hardest, stoking political instability.

Speculation on food markets is as old as agriculture--we have reports of of such from Aristotle--and is unavoidable. SOMEONE has to speculate on the future prices of commodities such as wheat, soybeans, pork .... The only question is, WHO? Modern markets, and communications technology, have evolved so that specialists have separated the speculation from the production of the commodities. Which makes price volatility less...not more, as this U.N. political hack has it (and a naive reporter believed).

Persevering readers will eventually come to this line;

At 795 million, the number of hungry people worldwide has declined by more than 200 million since 1990, despite population rises, the FAO reported in May.

Hey, wait a minute....